


losing you to the gutter

by tiesmp3



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: ...of sorts? i would imagine he’d have a form of ptsd after... you know., Good Sister Vanya Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, ah well. anyway., and a hug he gets . eventually. but anyway., essentially. five is fucked up, in that i needed to change things for this to work aka vanya stays in the house at some point, not necessarily canon compliant, please dont yell at me, something of a character analysis, thank you, this is not incest and if you treat it as such i will skin you, time travel does things to the mind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-16
Updated: 2019-03-16
Packaged: 2019-11-20 21:02:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18132104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiesmp3/pseuds/tiesmp3
Summary: fire, it burned my skinbut i still want to play with it.- “baby boy”, mother motheror, five is teetering on the edge of a very steep cliff—or, maybe he always has been, but no one’s ever reallycaredabout it, anyway.





	losing you to the gutter

**Author's Note:**

> i love character analyses (if, in fact, this could qualify as one). i love five. i love good and healthy sibling interaction. therefore, this.
> 
> hes just sad he needs 2 be loved and i. want to give him the world Come Here My Litel 58-Year-Old Boy I Love U,.
> 
> also this is not a ship fic and if you treat it as such i will find you, kill you, use ur teeth to make a cute necklace, and grind ur bones into salt. thanks.
> 
> enjoy !

_Fire._

_Everything is just... fire._   
  
_From the sky, ashes pour like snowfall, remnants of whatever the destruction was which had preceded—only destruction, only death, only fire and ash and smoke and dust and debris._   
_  
__And_ _Five_ _stumbles_ , _jaw_ _slack_ _with_ _disbelief_ , _shoulders_ _limp_ , _knees_ _shaking_ , _heart_ _racing_ , _eyes_ _scanning_ _for_ — _anything_. _Anything_. _Anyone_. _And_ _part_ _of_ _him_ _knows_ _there_ _will_ _be_ _no_ _one_ , _but_   _he’s nothing_ _if_ _he_ _isn’t_ _stubborn_.

 _He calls out for Vanya, for Ben, for his father—this one surprises even himself—for_ anyone _, and hears no answer, which is the exact outcome that he did_ not _want. He is thirteen years old, now, and everything is destroyed, and everyone is gone._

_He summons as much energy as he can—well, as much of it as hasn’t been absolutely wasted by his bouts of panic and exhausted by his efforts. He curses himself; he’s better than this, he knows better than this, he’s never been one to let his emotions—especially fear—get the better of him. His fists glow with the traces of an ability he’d literally been able to harness mere minutes ago, but now…_

_“Come on, come_ on! _Shit—”_

_He digs crescent moons into his palms as his arms start to shake, and he lets his hands go limp with an uncharacteristic resignation, irritated with the involuntary quivering in his body. He wants it to stop—all of this to stop._

_The scene changes, and he stands in the rubble of the Academy, not knowing how he got there. So he searches, and finds nothing but debris. Until he does._

_Well. At least, in a sick way, he’s somewhat glad that Vanya and Ben are nowhere to be found. He keeps this hope that, if there are any survivors out there, they’re two of the people he holds the nearest to his heart._

_Something tells him he’s wrong._

_He’s screaming, now, surrounded by the ruins of a place he’d called home—well, in as much as a home is the place one sleeps, not an actually homely place—and he doesn’t know how he got here, but he’s all nerves and fear and something so very much unlike Number Five that he feels he’s not real at all._

_He’s just choking, on air or the smoke or on this lump in his throat that doesn’t cease to bother him, and he scratches at his chest as it aches for oxygen, or for a release from whatever the hell he’s gotten himself into. And Number Five does not cry, but he is crying, knees giving out and scraping on the rubble upon which he falls, scratching at his chest and at his throat, gasping for air, gasping for help, and he can’t breathe, and he screams—_

With a jolt, Five sits up in bed, his forehead coated with a layer of sweat and his hands shaking with the remnants of… a dream. But he can’t seem to regulate his breathing, shake the feeling he’s still there, after all those years and all that time spent trying to get out. He feels… trapped.

The walls of this room that hasn’t been his in decades—in a building that he hasn’t even seen _standing_ in decades—are closing in on him, and he feels more like the thirteen-year-old boy whose body he’s stuck in than he has since… well. Forty-five years ago.

He grips onto the sheets of the bed, wiping off the sweat from his palms, trying to ease the quivering in his elbows, the pounding in his head, the ache in his throat. It feels raw, and he wonders whether he was actually, audibly screaming in real life. He swallows thickly, and he knows exactly what is coming.

Okay, so, what is it then? He gets back into this shitty thirteen-year-old body, and suddenly he’s having panic attacks again? He’s gone a long time without one—can’t even remember the last time he felt the least bit nervous—but the idea of going back to being alone and lost and surrounded by the bodies of the only people in this world that he has every truly cared about makes him sick to his stomach.

He hadn’t been drinking, but he gags anyway, bile rising in his throat. He forces it down and it burns. With a gasp, he turns, kicking his legs over the side of the bed, legs shaking as he tries to force himself to walk. He knows he shouldn’t be, he can’t, he won’t, but, well. He is nothing if not stubborn. And he really needs water—

“Five?”

Five startles, falling back onto the bed with an inglorious _thump_ , looking up at Vanya—who stands in his doorway with eyebrows furrowed—with wide eyes. They burn, he realizes then, and in the same moment he realizes he can’t remember the last time he actually slept through the night.

 _Probably because shit like_ that _happens when you sleep_ , he thinks, and blinks at his sister.

“What?” His voice comes out rough, like nails down a blackboard, and he chews on his tongue as he hears the voice of a little boy in his head. He’s hyper-aware of this, now, and it is nothing but uncomfortable. He shakes the reminder away.

Vanya hesitates, and he can see her figure just barely in the dimly lit room, stiff as a board leaning against the frame of his doorway. “Um—are you okay?”

“Why—why wouldn’t I be okay, Vanya?” The question comes out like a demand, snapped, and Five cannot bring himself to even mildly care about it. It was without intent, anyway, and he hopes she’ll realize that, at the very least. He still hasn’t entirely calmed himself down; he balls fists into the mattress and puts all his force into pushing them down in the hopes that it’ll help to quell the shaking in his hands.

“It’s just that…” She pauses then, and Five watches as she takes a step back from his doorframe, backing into the pitch-dark hallway. If he couldn’t hear her breathing, he’d assume she had just left entirely. “It’s just that you—you screamed, and I… I just wanted to make sure that, like—” She trails off.

Five thinks back to his sore throat, coupled with his raspy voice, and realizes his scream may actually _have_ been audible. In real life. He scoffs at himself at the thought, a quivering breath escaping from his lips. “No, I—I’m fine, thank you.

 _God, how_ old _are you, Five?_ he chides himself, mainly because he hasn’t spoken that cordially to anyone since he was probably around seven years old, which, even then, is still a stretch. And he also does _not_ need to be polite to _Vanya_ of all people, but he has this sort of underlying pity for her.

Maybe it’s because she was the closest to him back when they were actually thirteen. She was kind and made him feel less alone in a house big enough for thousands, and made him feel like less of an outcast. That’s what the two were, anyway. Just Vanya—ordinary, normal, soft—and Five—strange, insane, calculated.

They were best friends, Five remembers, and he can’t shake a smile off his face. Which is also why he’s so surprised at his reaction to when Vanya asks again whether he’s okay.

He responds by slamming his hands down on the mattress again. The _thump_ is dull and sends a small puff of dust flowering into the air, but it’s loud enough to make Vanya’s vague figure in the blackness noticeably flinch. “Yes, Vanya, I-I’m _fine!_ What did you not understand about the _first time_ I said it!”

He hates it as soon as the words are out of his mouth. Hates his irrationality, hates the way he’s speaking to her—all she’d ever done when they were kids was support him and be the only one who treated him like a human being, despite all his cockiness and stubbornness, and here he was, acting no better than the rest of his siblings did when they were kids.

To his surprise, Vanya lingers; he hears her labored breathing in the hallway and wonders, selfishly, whether she, too, is being overcome by some inner anxiety of sorts. Five realizes that he’s stopped shaking, which is great, except now Vanya _hasn’t_ and he’d never admit it to her face but he cares _so much_ about her.

“You-you can’t—” Vanya begins finally, and Five breathes a sigh of relief for not having lost her just yet. “You can’t _shut me out,_ Five. You can’t. You were gone for—for—I don’t know, for _you_ it was forty-five years, and I just—I _know_ you need someone, Five, I know it. You can’t shut me out just because you’re—you’re still _living_ in that awful place. At least in your own head!”

 _You have no idea_ , he thinks, but lets out a deep breath he didn’t know he was holding. It comes out ragged, and he lets his shoulders go limp as he nods.

“I know,” he says, and he feels as though he sounds like a child—well. Obviously. But he sounds like a child who’s been scolded, and he hates himself for this vulnerability.

_Shit like this would’ve gotten you killed then._

But then again, this internal monologue proves Vanya’s entire point.

He’s spent the majority of his life—well, what _was_ the majority of his life, anyway—worrying about surviving, about getting back, about saving the people he cares about most. Now that he’s accomplished two out of three, and besides the fact that the third part is the hardest, he still is left wondering what’s beyond that.

If you’ve lived a life for one purpose alone, what happens when you fulfill that purpose?

Oblivion?

If _that’s_ not one of Five’s biggest fears, he doesn’t know _what_ is.

“So,” his sister replies, “what, then? _Talk_ to me, Five.”

She approaches him. Sits down next to him on the bed. Puts a hand on his shoulder. And he stiffens, drawing in a deep, involuntary breath at the touch. Vanya pulls back her hand like she’d just put it on a hot coal, and Five curses himself for allowing himself to be so jumpy, so nervous, so high-strung and anxious and uneasy and _scared_ in the presence of someone he knows won’t harm him.

And he tells her. He calls it stupid, qualifies his fears, paints himself out to be the world’s biggest moron for going back to that horrible place involuntarily, tells her not to worry about it.

But as best friends tend to do, no matter how long they’ve been separated from one another, his sister can read him like a book, and he can tell she sees right through his lying.

He tells her then that he is, in fact, okay. It was just a dream, and he knows it.

But he knows that Vanya knows he hasn’t slept in forever, that he drinks coffee so much because it keeps him awake and keeps him away from the places he goes back to under the influence of sleep. That even when he’s _awake_ he can sometimes hear the same silence he heard at the end of the world, see the remains of the Academy when he walks up to its gates, smell the smoke and dust and ash in the air and choke on it when the sky is clear of it all, feel the heat of fires that don’t even exist yet.

And it all comes tumbling out, like a waterfall of words and emotions and things Five hasn’t felt since he first stumbled into the apocalypse, skinned knees and dirty hands and the culmination of forty-five years of loneliness and loss, and he still feels like a thirteen year old boy with all this—all this _weakness_.

And when Vanya finally speaks, he listens with open ears and an open mind.

“You don’t need to be strong for _anyone_ , Five. You carry this weight on yourself that I couldn’t— _none of us_ could—even begin to understand. And I don’t pretend to know how difficult it is, but I do know that for now, at least… I can promise you one thing.”

She stands up from the bed, bends down slightly to his level—she’s not much taller than him, even in his teenage boy body—and, when prompted with a nod, puts a hand on either one of Five’s shoulders.

“You are… you are _safe_ here, Five.” Then she pauses, musing, and continues, “Well, as safe as Number Five has ever been, anyway,” she adds with a ghost of a smile. “B-but my point is, at least—you’re not _alone_ here, even if you _aren’t_ safe. Because you have people now. You have _us_ now. And we’re a family, whether we like it or not.”

He stares at her, almost blankly, allowing the words to click into his mind, seep through his veins, become a part of him. He wants to tattoo them on his skin and broadcast them across his brain for as long as he’s alive, and he swallows thickly, grabbing loosely and almost aimlessly at Vanya’s wrists.

The reminder was something necessary, because of course he _knows_ —knows they’re family, knows they’re there, knows he’s not physically alone anymore—but he never thought any of them cared enough about him to do anything about it.

So he leans toward Vanya, face burning with the threat of a sob edging at his lips, and Vanya envelops him in her arms. For a second, they’re both thirteen again—well, mentally, at least—and Five feels a comforting warmth seep over him, that warmth of familiarity and _home_  that has been foreign to his heart for forty-five years of his life.

Number Five does not cry, but he _cries_.

And, well, he’s needed that for a lifetime now.

**Author's Note:**

> now imagine this........ happened/....... and then imagine when five realizes who actually caused the apocalypse
> 
> i love pain.
> 
> anyways! i do this a lot! follow me on my various social media:  
> instagram: @circularmotio.n (video edits)  
> twitter: @wtmbway  
> tumblr: @vitalmp3
> 
> leave kudos + comments if u please; theyre greatly appreciated and they FUEL my need to validation, and also will help to get u more content of this disaster family, if thats what youre into.
> 
> stay healthy, stay safe, and stan aidan gallagher. love you!


End file.
